Bulldozer attack on Nazi concentration camp

Unknown assailants cause €50,000 (£40,000) of damage to site of Langenstein-Zwieberge camp in Germany using stolen bulldozer

An allied soldier with one of the liberated prisoners in Langenstein-Zwieberge

By Justin Huggler, Berlin

3:51PM GMT 10 Dec 2014

A month after the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" sign was stolen from Dachau, another former Nazi concentration camp has been attacked in Germany.

Unknown assailants used a stolen bulldozer to smash their way into the memorial at the site of the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp, where more than 2,000 prisoners were worked to death, and caused an estimated €50,000 (£40,000) of damage.

The motive for the attack remains unclear. Police said they were not ruling out a connection with neo-Nazi groups, but the the fact that memorial signs and information boards were untouched meant the incident was "not necessarily" connected with the far right.

"At this stage of the investigation, we suspect a more likely culprit is someone who started the bulldozer up and drove it a few kilometers as a prank. We don't have any other leads," a police spokesman told MDR, a local radio broadcaster.

The bulldozer was stolen from a nearby building site and driven a mile across fields, before being used to tear down the entire perimeter fence at the memorial site, and ram the main gates to the eight miles of underground tunnels built by forced labourers at the site. It was later found torched nearby.

Langenstein-Zwieberge, a subcamp of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, was established towards the end of the war in 1944. The Nazis sent more than 7,000 prisoners from 23 countries there as slave labourers, to construct vast underground passages where warplane and weapons manufacturing could be concealed from Allied bombers.

More than 2,000 of the inmates were literally worked to death. Life expectancy at the camp was just six months. Some of the tunnels were big enough to contain train carriages, and were built with Nazi "cost projections" of a death for every metre built.

Despite a €3,000 reward offered for its recovery, the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which was stolen from Dachau last month still has not been found, and police are continuing their enquiries.